HPD expert: 80-year-old is Life's kissing sailor

Houston man's claim as famous kisser gets boostMcDuffie definitely is the man in the picture, police artist declares

ANNE MARIE KILDAY, Copyright 2007 Houston Chronicle

Published 5:30 am, Saturday, August 4, 2007

Photo: PAT SULLIVAN, AP

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Glenn McDuffie holds a portrait of himself as a young man, left, and a copy of Alfred Eisenstaedt's iconic Life magazine shot of a sailor embracing a nurse. McDuffie says he is the sailor in the photo.

Glenn McDuffie holds a portrait of himself as a young man, left, and a copy of Alfred Eisenstaedt's iconic Life magazine shot of a sailor embracing a nurse. McDuffie says he is the sailor in the photo.

Photo: PAT SULLIVAN, AP

HPD expert: 80-year-old is Life's kissing sailor

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Glenn McDuffie was celebrating something on Friday other than his 80th birthday — what he says is the long-sought "proof" that he was the sailor kissing the nurse in Times Square in the famous Life magazine photograph by Alfred Eisenstaedt.

After taking precise measurements of McDuffie's wrists, knuckles, arms, forehead and ears, Gibson compared them to enlargements of the famous photo.

To replicate the image, Gibson had McDuffie pose embracing a pillow, as a substitute for the nurse.

"I don't say this lightly. What I do is usually a matter of life or death, so I don't mess around when I identify someone," said Gibson, whom the 2005 book of Guinness World Records said has helped police identify more criminal suspects than any other person.

Calculated move

Gibson, who has done numerous reconstructions of crime victims' faces using only a skull, said she carefully studied the bone structure of all 11 men who claimed to be the sailor.

"I was able to eliminate all the others based on their foreheads, or the superciliary arch — where the eyebrows are. Unfortunately, your nose grows all your life. I have a picture of Glenn showing that his nose is different. But that growth is normal and was to be expected," Gibson said.

McDuffie also has taken several lie detector tests and is the only one who can name the other two sailors in the photo — "Bob Little, from Buffalo, New York," and "Jack Holmes, from Pittsburgh" — because they shipped out with him three days later on board the Alexander Lillington, Gibson noted.

In addition, Gibson said she "always wondered" about one aspect of the Eisenstaedt image: Why was the sailor's arm crooked in such an odd way? Only McDuffie could provide the answer, she said.

"I was kissing her, and then I heard someone running up. So, I realized there was someone taking our picture. I moved my hand so that the nurse's face would show," McDuffie said.

Gibson said she was willing to put her reputation on the line for the elderly veteran, who lives in a north Houston trailer park with an American flag displayed in the yard. "I was actually honored. I was moved."

"I get justice for people with pictures," she said. "And he'd been frustrated by a frivolous news media. Just because he's kissing someone, that image isn't honored. I look at it and I see a hero. Glenn put himself in harm's way in the Navy, long before that photograph was taken."

No recognition

In 1980, the editors of Life sought the two people in the photo, and 11 men and one woman came forward.

"It didn't get important to me until they asked me to step forward," McDuffie said. "They asked for someone to come forward, and that's what I did. But I had known it was me for a long time before that."

"I never thought I needed publicity, just to be somebody," McDuffie said. "But it made me mad they wouldn't recognize it was me."

Debra Richman Selden, a spokeswoman for the magazine, said Friday, "Life has never taken a position in any of the identity disputes regarding the identities of the sailor or nurse."

McDuffie said his parents tried to keep him from joining the Navy at age 15, but he told them that if they did he would never come home to Kannapolis, N.C.

On Aug. 14, 1945, he was in Times Square when the word came.

"When I got off from the subway, a lady told me the war was over, and I went into the street yelling. I saw the nurse and she was smiling at me, so I just grabbed her," McDuffie said. "But we never spoke."

McDuffie served in the Navy from 1943 to 1946, mostly as a gunner. After the war, he worked for the U.S. Post Office, played semipro baseball, dabbled in race cars and worked with a florist in southwest Houston.

He's been married and divorced three times, and has one surviving daughter, who was driving to Houston Friday to take him out for a birthday dinner.

"She told me I could go anywhere I wanted," McDuffie said.

"So, we're going to Red Lobster, and I'm going to have lobster and shrimp."

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